Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance Invisible Acts [Paperback]

Examining some of the most iconic texts in English theatre history, including Titus Andronicus and The Changeling, this book, now in paperback with a new Preface, reveals the pernicious erasure of rape and violence against women in the early modern era and the politics and ethics of rehearsing these negotiations on the 20th and 21st century stages.List of IllustrationsPreface to Paperback Edition Acknowledgements Encounters with the Missing: From the Invisible Acts to In/visible Acts Rape's Metatheatrical Return: Rehearsing Sexual Violence Among the Early Moderns The Punitive Scene and the Performance of Salvation: Violence, the Flesh, and the Word Witness to Despair: The Martyr of Malfi's Ghost The Architecture of the Act: Renovating Beatrice Joanna's Closet Afterword Bibliography Notes Index

'Introducing the complex and useful concept of 'in/visible acts' of witnessing, among other things Kim Solga provides a nuanced and carefully historicized feminist performance analysis of violence against women as it is at once represented and disappeared in both early modern performance and contemporary productions of early modern plays. The book brilliantly negotiates the tensions involved in staging spectacular absence, and the problems and promises of making ethical use of representations produced by iconic playwrights who are emphatically neither feminist nor 'our contemporaries.' Compellingly written, theoretically sophisticated, thickly researched, and surprisingly uplifting, Violence Against Women in Early Modern Performance is a major contribution to early modern, feminist, theatre and performance studies. It concludes with a bracing call for an actively ethical critical spectatorship in our time.' - Ric Knowles, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Guelph, Canada

'Powerfully argued and elegantly written, Solga's book reminds us that the practices of violence against women, so familiar in early modern theatre, return with spectacular fl£I